'"Christ is the Answer": What is the Question?' A Ghana Airways Prayer Vigil and its Implications for Religion, Evil and Public Space

Abstract

AbstractReligion and life, both private and public, remain strongly linked in Africa. This was recently expressed in a prayer vigil organized by Ghana Airways when the staff and management invited a London-based Ghanaian evangelist, Lawrence Tetteh, to lead a 'healing and deliverance' service aimed at exorcizing evil spirits from the affairs of the airline and releasing it from its predicaments. The organization of a healing and deliverance session by a public corporation, it is argued, is symptomatic of the quick African resort to the sphere of religion in the search for solutions to life's difficulties. Religious functionaries including Pentecostal/ Charismatic pastors are important in Africa as purveyors of powerful prayers, potent medicines, and amulets for protection against evil. The Pentecostal 'healing and deliverance' ministry has become popular in African contexts like that of Ghana because it takes African worldviews of mystical causality seriously. This Christianity promises Christian alternatives to the search for security that drives people into the courts of other religious functionaries.